Happy Halloween!

What a big week! I have to say the costumes on Friday were awesome! Princesses, Power Rangers, Vampires and more! Everyone looked so great!!

 

 

For Language Arts this week we have read fiction and non-fiction books about bats! (Spoooooky) We started out talking about the -at word family and creating some batty -at words! This was great since last week we focused on the short a sound in phonics. 

Once we had read quite a bit about bats we made Bat acrostic poems! Using the letters BATS, these kiddos wrote words or sentences on their poems to tell about bats. 

Using our paint mixing brilliance we mixed black, brown and white to make different shade of bat fur. Then we painted some paper, let it dry, and used it to make our own bats! 

We have also started our Daily 5 routines! This week we practiced our first center, Read to Self. This is when we read books to ourselves in our class, practice reading the whole time and build our reading stamina! I was absolutely amazed at how well they did! 

 

This week in Social we talked more about the groups we belong to in our school and community. Some groups we belong to in our community would be our teams, clubs, daycares and most of all our families! To show what groups we belong to each student decorated their own lego character! They loved this!

 

Students are invited to bring in any objects or pictures that show what groups they belong to for show and share on Tuesdays & Thursdays. 

In Math this week we started representing numbers to 20 using base ten blocks. The students are working on building their understanding of tens and ones and how they make up our numbers.

Afterwards they partnered up and called out numbers and their partner had to build that number with their blocks!  

Have a wonderful Halloween!
A reminder, Wednesday next week is Early Dismissal at 2:15pm.

Whew, a full week! Thank you to everyone who made time to meet with me for interviews this week. 

Halloween is coming up and we're getting a bit spooky over here! 

We read Creepy Carrots this week, which is an adorable book about a rabbit being stalked by carrots! Afterwards we created our own Creepy Carrots, using black wax crayons and water colour paint. They were pretty interested to see how the wax crayon repells the water and shows up even when you paint over it! 

In Math this week we have start to really focus on numbers from 11-20, how they look in a tens frame and their order. 

Early in the week we used fuzzies to show we can count and represent numbers 11 - 20. We discussed how if we make a number in a straight line or in a circle, does that change the value? This was to reinforce that the last number said is always the amount. 

Then we looked at what parts make a whole number. We would split an amount in two and see what different combinations of number parts made a whole between 11 - 20 (i.e. 16 is 9 and 7, or 5 and 11). 

In centers on Friday we worked with tens frames and playdough to show numbers, played Ten Frame Memory and practiced counting up to 20. 

                                                       

In Science, we are taking a break from colour mixing and looking into the Fall season still. This week we talked about the weather changes that happen, what kind of clothes we wear and looked at live earth cams of places around the world experiencing fall! In the footage we could observe what kind of clothes and shoes people wear in the fall season. 

In Social we are continuing to discuss our groups and which groups we belong to. Next week we will be starting a show and share. 

Darren Maltais, our district Technology Leader, came in this week to give us a lesson in chromebooks! All the students learned how to log on, type their own passwords and navigate around our classroom blog. 

They also had some ABC typing practice! 

Next week is our Halloween Celebration! On Friday students can come to school with their costumes! After lunch we are going to head over to Salem Manor to do a Halloween Parade for the elderly residents. 

Post Turkey Week!

What a quick week - three whole days! 

This week we finished up our Jolly Phonics Letters a - z! This is so exciting because already these smart kiddos are starting to become emerging readers and sound out words when writing! 

In Math this week we talked a bit more about one more, one less, two more and two less. They are basically pro's at this now! We also talked a bit about even and odd numbers and how we can tell if a number is even or odd. 

At centers we built towers with blocks and checked if every block had a buddy (even) or if there was a block left over on their own (odd). 

In Science we had previously witnessed what adding white to a colour did and this week we got to see what happens when you add black! As we added more black our colours got darker! We also noticed that they all turned more black than their original colour and our last mix experiements all looked black! 

Also we have continued talking about signs of the seasons, especially Fall. This week we got to go on a Leaf Hunt! 

First of course we had to make a list of ways to describe leaves: Leaves can be pointy, round, fat, skinny, sharp, soft, red, yellow, orange or brown! Once we had our list we headed outside! 

There was so many beautiful leaves outside! The colours were absolutely lovely. When we came in we made some crayon rubbings on our leaves so that we could observe them and describe them. 

 

There was no popcorn words this week! I also took time to sit with some students and have them read their words to me. If they struggled with some words I wrote practice notes home :) 

See you all next week! 

October is Here!

This week has been a fantastic week! All the students are getting so good at our morning routine we have had some chances to add in extra brain breaks and fun activities!

It all started with our walking trip to the Leduc Public Library! This was an awesome way to check out some important buildings and businesses in our community! At the library the students had books read to them, enjoyed the childrens reading area, made book marks and learned how to use the Library services. They really loved it!

In Language Arts this week we are finishing up our last few letters in Jolly Phonics, J, Z, &W. Next week we will do X & Y!
We also have been working in our new Canadian Phonics books with beginning sounds! Everyone has been doing really great with this! Knowing our letter sounds is really helpful when we sound out words in our writing and journals. It always amazes me how fast they are learning!

For writing, we first read the beloved Brown Bear, Brown Bear. What do you see? I love this book and the kids really do too! It's great when they can read along with me and follow the repetitive parts of the story.
Afterwards we created our own Brown Bear books! This was a great way to see who remembers how to spell their colour words and sounding out animal names. Those who finished read their books to the whole class.








In Math this week we worked a lot with tens frames and recognizing number's formations in tens frames (i.e. what does 5 look like in a tens frame? it fills up half the frame!)
As a class we played around with tens frames and fuzzies to practice our 1 more, 1 less, 2 more 2 less facts.

 

Afterwards, in pairs they got to work with cards and add 1 more, etc, to their tens frames.


In Science we tested out what happens to a colour when we add WHITE! Since they already know how to tell if a colour is lighter or darker, we added white to 3 colours multiple times and came up with: White makes colours lighter!
We are excited to see our results from Part 2: What happens when we add BLACK to a colour?

 






This week at assembly all of the K to Gr. 2 students talked about what it is to be thankful. In Thanksgiving Spirit, Earl the Turkey came out! We helped spruce him up by adding "feathers" to his thankful tail! Each student wrote something they were thankful for this year and added it to him. He really is quite stunning!

Some Important Reminders: 
No School Monday or Tuesday 

Lice Checks are October 15th. If you have checked your child's hair at home please return the pink sheet if you DO NOT want them checked at school. 

Parent Teacher Interviews are October 21st & 22nd 
If you have not signed up yet please click here. 

We're Colour Specialists!

Being SAFE and Smart

Our week started off with a presentation on bus safety! This is such a fun time for the kids every year! We get to hear from Sarah the Bus Riding Puppet and practice save behaviours around the bus and on the bus.
 



Also a big thanks to Nurse Lorna, who showed us how important it is to take our time and wash our hands!
Everyone put on some fake germ lotion and then went to wash their hands! Using a black light we could see how many "germs" stick around when you don't scrub enough!

 






We have become excellent scientists this week!

With our colour mixing unit we practiced colour mixing two different ways!

First we use play dough! (Thanks parents for making this possible!) Each student got a plain white play dough ball; except when they started to squish and moved it - a colour showed up! Each ball was either red, blue or yellow - our primary colours!
Afterwards we read mouse paint to find out about how our primary colours mix to make new colours. Then we went back to our desks and acted out the book with play dough! It went awesome!

         

      

Later in the week we mixed up some delicious Jello! We started with red and yellow and made predictions what would happened when we added blue! They were all blown away when the jello started to change!

To see more pictures from our experiment click here.


In Math this week we're still working on representing numbers to 10. We made little counting books about items in our fridge that shows we can draw a set of objects to match a number 1 - 10. We also did our best spelling, by sounding our the letters we heard in the words.

We also had our second week of math centers! Math centers is a hands on time where we get to practice the skills we've been working on all week. As the students are in smaller groups, it also gives me the chance to review and reinforce some ideas with students who need a little extra help. PLUS, they're always fun! 

In Language Arts we are working on our 3rd group in phonics, the letters - G, O, U, & L. We have been listening for these consonants at the beginning and end of words. 

We also read a story about Apples! After reading we talked about what apples have, are, and can make! We worked on writing our very own apple sentences! They did pretty good!